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Petition to open source Flash

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Re: Petition to open source Flash

#61

Post by SolarNet »

dragonwriter wrote: post #47
soylentcola wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there still a standalone Flash player? (or at least, will the debug version work?) Haven't messed with Flash stuff in over a decade but I remember having a standalone player to play downloaded SWF files back in the day. No idea if there's anything roughly equivalent out there in its current incarnation. A sandboxed player application would go a long way toward the uses mentioned in this thread, no? I wonder when w…

> I wonder when we'll start seeing Flash emulators being developed to play back all that old content. http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/

A dead project due to the shear complexity and obfuscation and proprietary bug/feature weirdness (e.g. undocumented relied upon in some edge case feature/bugs tend to exist in proprietary single-implementation systems) of flash.

Things like Mono took a decade to finish as an exact clone of a portion of Microsoft's implementation, and that was only possible because the people using it (the target audience begin linux programmers) could fix the code as needed. Flash's target audience is artists.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#62

Post by ghaff »

lj3 wrote: post #38
nradov wrote: post #28

Chances are that Flash contains licensed third-party IP and thus Adobe couldn't unilaterally open source it even if they wanted to.

Now I'm really curious if that's the case. It could explain why they didn't open source the Flash runtime back when they open sourced the flex compiler.

At the very least, there would certainly need to be a lot of due diligence work. A lot of people seem to think that open sourcing something is as simple as dumping a source code tree to github, setting a license, and calling it a day.

It's not. Even when doing so is a priority, it can take months of work.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#63

Post by riffraff »

jarym wrote: post #57

So much hate for Flash. Yes it has regular security holes, is CPU hungry and a lot of people used it to create some mightily annoying things.... But Flash was a gift from the gods back in the early days of IE and most people forget that. If you wanted to make some HTML look nice you had little more than the dreaded 'blink' tag to work with. If it weren't for Flash I doubt we'd have anywhere near as advanced CSS, SVG,…

I had browser games in flash that worked, now I have unity games that don't.

I honestly wish we'd stuck with flash.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#64

Post by Rusky »

notacoward wrote: post #19

No no no no NO. It's time to get rid of Flash. Open-sourcing will make it live forever. Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. It's also woefully insecure. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" will only work for the most trivial bugs in the most common code paths. Plenty of vulnerabilities will remain. In open source, they'll be even easier for attackers to find…

It's not about making it available for continued production use. It's about archiving the content people created with it.

That's getting harder and harder to do as platforms get more and more complicated. "Mostly" compatible is less than helpful. Having access to the actual primary Flash implementation would be invaluable for preservation efforts.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#66

Post by hexmiles »

yuhong wrote: post #42
nkkollaw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one that isn't abandoned, which in 2020 will be the open source one. Again, I don't see why if there's interest in Flash and Adobe is abandoning its player, the open source ones can't be made to work as well (or as bad) as Adobe's. Firefox copied IE's quirks back in the day, I don't see why it can't be done again.

Flash is more complex than HTML/CSS/JS though.

are you sure? i worked with flash and actionscript, and i doubt they are more complex than html/css/js, personaly i think the contrary.

What make more difficult the reimplementation is the abscence of a specification or a standard.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#67

Post by spcelzrd »

notacoward wrote: post #19

No no no no NO. It's time to get rid of Flash. Open-sourcing will make it live forever. Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. It's also woefully insecure. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" will only work for the most trivial bugs in the most common code paths. Plenty of vulnerabilities will remain. In open source, they'll be even easier for attackers to find…

Flash is cancer. It literally retarded the growth of browser technology by years.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#69

Post by __s »

captainmuon wrote: post #53
notacoward wrote: post #19

No no no no NO. It's time to get rid of Flash. Open-sourcing will make it live forever. Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. It's also woefully insecure. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" will only work for the most trivial bugs in the most common code paths. Plenty of vulnerabilities will remain. In open source, they'll be even easier for attackers to find…

Do you think Flash is insecure in principle, or in implementation? I think it is very much a problem of the implementation. I don't know if Adobe/Macromedia could have done better, or if the backwards compatibility requirements make it impossible to maintain, but I'd like to see for myself. Anyway, you have no reason to be afraid. All mayor browsers are dropping support for plugins anyway. An open source flash player…

The issue with a plugin architecture is that it makes it difficult to compete. There essentially will come a pool of plugins which are expected to be installed on every user's machine, & without standardization or open source implementations you'll end up with 1 plugin being used on any base browser as opposed to different versions on each browser

In theory we could create a basic browser with various HTML/JS/CSS spec features created as a plugin

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